I once shook Joe Thomas’ hand, and it was magical

Good news first: Joe Thomas is still a Cleveland Brown. I mean, that’s kind of good news. I’m not sure it’s great news for Joe. He is literally one of the best players of his generation, and he is on one of the worst teams of its generation. His superb play since 2007 has been wasted year after year. He has blocked for a cadre of quarterbacks so consistently disappointing that they inspired a fan to construct a graveyard full of them for Halloween. (They weren’t even zombies. Zombies can still move and hunt and wreak havoc and stuff. Those QBs are just skeletons decaying in the dirt. No one watches movies about skeletons decaying in the dirt.)

I went to Browns training camp one day in the summer of 2007. It was an exciting time to be a Browns fan, as training camp always is. They had finished the previous year 4-12, but so what? They always finish the previous year 4-12. This year…this year was going to be different. They had the No. 3 pick in the draft in ’07. In a rare twist, they didn’t screw it up. They didn’t get cute. They didn’t try to outsmart anyone, least of all themselves. They stayed at No. 3 and took the best damn ballplayer on the board: Joe Thomas, left tackle, Wisconsin.

(The cute, screwed-up, outsmarting part would come later, sure as a summer sunrise, when they traded up to take Brady Quinn.)

After that day’s practice at training camp, a friend and I hung around to try to meet some players, maybe snag some autographs. It was eight years ago, which doesn’t seem terribly long in life time but which seems extraordinarily long in terms of my hope and naivete. All you gotta do is believe, I thought of my Browns fandom, our faith and loyalty will be repaid in time. I was relatively wide-eyed and pure back then. Players were still heroes. I’m sure there were off-field transgressions just as there are today, but I paid them less mind. Same goes for concussions; just a few years earlier, the “Hit Stick” feature was a cornerstone of the latest Madden offering. Football wasn’t sullied like it is now. If ignorance isn’t bliss, it can at least be blissful.

After a while — it could have been five minutes, it could have been an hour — players started coming by the fence to ham it up with the fans. Constituent service, they call it in Washington. I remember exactly none of the other players I saw except for Joe Thomas. He was the only one I wanted to see. Before he played a down in Cleveland, he was a Bunyanesque folk hero. Everything about him just screamed Pro Bowler. 6-foot-6, 312 pounds, from Wisconsin. Wisconsin! Getting an offensive lineman from Wisconsin is like getting a sommelier from Paris or a weed guy from Boulder.

He was the sort of man we needed in Cleveland. He was the sort of man we yearned for in Cleveland. My old man played offensive line back in the day, and made it a point to watch linemen often. I remember him telling stories about Gene Hickerson pulling out in front of Jim Brown and of Doug Dieken protecting Brian Sipe, tears practically welling in his eyes as he recalled their technique. Joe Thomas was his sort of player, and by proxy, mine.

In time, my friend and I saw Thomas and went straight toward him. The crowd around him wasn’t as big as you’d think; perhaps everyone was making a beeline for Brady Quinn. I’m not much for autographs, but Thomas’ was one I wanted to get. You could tell even then that this guy was going to play in the league for a decade, easy. He eschewed Radio City Music Hall on draft day for a fishing trip with his dad, for crying out loud. He wasn’t going to lose his head in the clouds or get drunk in public. He was just going to show up and play some football.

He signed a small Browns flag I had, and I think my friend’s hat as well. We said our thank yous. I forget if he offered the handshakes or we did. The latter seems more likely, but it doesn’t matter — we shook Joe Thomas’ hand. We shook Joe Thomas’ hand. It was like shaking hands with a sequoia. From the moment we decided to go his way, I had planned something that I was going to say to him. After he signed our stuff and we shook his hand, I looked him in the eye and told him, “We appreciate offensive line play here.” It was the dorkiest thing in the world, but hell if I care. I shook Joe Thomas’ hand and told him I appreciate his work.

And on Tuesday afternoon, he was nearly not a Brown anymore. That’s the bad news.

There are reports of all shapes, but the crux of the matter is that the Browns had some manner of conversation about trading Joe Thomas — JOE THOMAS — to the Denver Broncos —THE DENVER BRONCOS. Like, John Elway’s team. Not just the team he used to quarterback — the team he is in charge of now as general manager and executive vice president of football operations. I know The Drive and all that is ancient history and shouldn’t be relevant to a trade in 2015, but when it comes to trading Joe Thomas, Lone Pillar of the Organization, you bet your ass it matters.

The trade didn’t come to fruition, as the Browns and Broncos couldn’t agree on compensation. Denver was willing to send at least a first-round pick, it seems, and maybe more, but the terms were never settled upon. There are some reports saying that it came down to the 4 p.m. trade deadline, and others that say it didn’t. I’m choosing to believe the former. I’m choosing to believe that the deal was in place. I’m choosing to believe that the Browns were too incompetent to complete it. I’m considering believing that it was because there were too many Xeroxes of Ray Farmer’s butt in the fax machine.

That said, I don’t like straight-up insulting sports executive-types or calling for their jobs. The former is rude, and the latter understates the difficulty of the occupation. Only one team wins it all every year, and a large handful of teams suck every year. If it were really that easy to put a good team together, we’d see more of them. But my god. Trading Joe Thomas? There’s a school of thought that would have viewed such a move as generous to Joe; You deserve to play for a winner, big guy. I get that, and I almost support it, but not quite. I’m too selfish. I’ve had enough of our best guys going on to succeed elsewhere. I want Joe Thomas in brown and orange as long as possible; sorry, big guy.

Joe Thomas may be the last athlete that I truly look up to. Part of that is due to age. I’m older than a fair chunk of pro athletes nowadays, and it doesn’t feel like an endorsement of one’s priorities or character to admire a 20-year-old because he can run real fast. But more than that, I look up to Joe Thomas because he hasn’t complained once since he’s been in Cleveland. (If he has, I don’t want to know about it. Let me preserve my fantasy, please.) He hasn’t bitched about his contract or thrown a quarterback under the bus — they do well enough falling under it on their own, thank you very much. He’s been an adult in the room, a rock, a leader, since day one. Hell, he led a group of of veterans straight into Jimmy Haslam’s office to tell him to get his shit together. Is that not leadership?

Joe Thomas is still a Cleveland Brown. Though this could be read as wishing ill upon him, I hope he remains a Cleveland Brown and retires a Cleveland Brown. I hope he gets his name in the ring of honor and a statue outside the stadium. I hope he gets an award named after him, and a foundation too. I hope there are public parks and scholarships and sandwiches dedicated to his name. Whenever this stupid franchise pulls itself together and wins more games than it loses for more than one year, I hope he’s there to celebrate it.

I would hope he’s the one running the Browns one day, but I’ll stop short of that. Hasn’t the man suffered enough?